Networking architectures have grown increasingly complex in communications environments. In addition, the augmentation of clients or end users wishing to communicate in a network environment has caused many networking configurations and systems to respond by adding elements to accommodate the increase in networking traffic and the individualistic needs of new end users.
As the subscriber base of end users increases, proper routing and efficient management of communication sessions and data flows becomes even more critical. One significant area for any group of end users relates to billing. The problem is particularly troubling in mobile service provider network architectures, where devices can roam from network to network.
Existing solutions fail to properly account for billing. Mobile service providers have a desire to do service-based billing, where they bill the consumer and each other based on the service that is used by the subscriber. For example, IMS tries to provide for service-based billing for SIP services by including a P-CSCF in the visited network. However, this works only for SIP and fails in many cases where the SIP message alone cannot easily provide the identity of the service that the user is receiving. Other flawed architectures include RFC 3455, which defines P-Visited-Network-ID and the P-Access-Network-Info headers and associated procedures, but which fails to account for proper billing.
Thus, designing an effective billing mechanism for such roaming users provides a significant challenge to component manufacturers, system administrators, and network operators.